Online mapping services, such as, for example, Bing® Maps (Bing is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation of Redmond, Wash.) or Google® Maps (Google is a registered trademark of Google Inc. of Mountain View, Calif.), strive to have an extensive representation of Earth having maximum coverage, freshness and depth. However, maintaining maximum coverage is expensive. For example, acquisition of new high quality image data for a geographic image database is usually quite costly. For example, when acquiring high-resolution aerial images, one must incur a cost for a plane to travel over a geographic area to capture high-resolution image data. Typically, the cost for acquiring the high-resolution aerial image data is quite expensive. As a result, high-resolution aerial image data may not be acquired frequently and online high quality image data may be several years old.
When acquiring street-level images, vehicles equipped with image capturing devices, such as, for example, cameras or other devices, as well as location sensors, may travel along streets to scan and collect the street-level images and corresponding location data. Each of the vehicles may have a storage device for storing the captured street-level images and the corresponding location data and may periodically upload all of the captured street-level image data to one or more remote computing devices for processing. In some cases, the captured street-level image data may be uploaded only at an end of each day, thereby requiring each of the vehicles to have a storage device capable of storing up to one day's amount of collected street-level images and location data. When a storage device in a vehicle has reached its capacity, no additional street-level images and location data may be captured. The one or more computing devices may process all of the uploaded captured street-level image data, from each of the vehicles, in order to update coverage of one or more geographic area.